John Berry (he who signs not his name) wrote: > > Cold Fusion is somewhat fringe, but as much respect as I have for Jed's > dedication I can not imagine either in a technological nor > political-business-economic way in which cold fusion would be what powers > our houses or cars . . .
Piece of cake. The only thing preventing it is politics and lack of knowledge. Besides, even if some technical glitch prevented small scale use, it would still lower primary energy costs effectively to zero (but not distribution or equipment costs). > even if the science were totally sorted, further the experimentation is * > generally* beyond that which can be achieved outside of a good lab or > without good expertise. Far beyond. No point in discussing it. If you don't have a roomfull of gadgets such as SEM and mass spectrometers, forget it. The academic political opposition that has held back cold fusion is -- finally! -- starting to crumble. I can see signs of it every week. Venture capitalists and the like are coming out of the woodwork in unprecedented numbers. Agencies that have not funded research since 1989 are funding it, and others are seriously considering it. New experiments are underway. A lot of this stuff is just starting up and I cannot talk about it, but in the next few months I hope I can. There will be some discussion of new work at the MIT seminar this Saturday. No one would accuse me of being Dr. Pangloss. I am seldom optimistic without a good reasons. I think that a long last we are seeing good reasons to hope for more rapid progress in cold fusion. And if we trigger a tsunami of research, with thousands of people participating, you will see more progress every week than you see now in a year. That is what happened with airplanes in 1911, and transistors in 1954. It can happen now. My goal is to trigger that kind of uncontrolled free-for-all tsunami of competitive research. Many of today's cold fusion researchers do not want to see that happen, but frankly I hope they are swept aside. I think the researchers know what questions to ask, and what experiments are needed to make progress. Some of the researchers do, anyway. If many more enter the field some of them will do what is needed. The ones who go off on a tangent doing the wrong experiments and rushing down dead-end streets will not matter. If we could only push aside the politics and get funding, I think cold fusion would make very rapid progress. Mike McKubre thinks so too, as he said on CBS, and reiterated in remarks to me at the recent U. Missouri conference. He has more credibility than I do, to say the least. - Jed
